Arroyo to Plead with Kuwait Emir Today for OFW’s Life

MANILA — A prospect of a reprieve for overseas Filipino worker (OFW) Marilou Ranario who has been found guilty of killing her lady employer on Jan. 10, 2005, brightens as President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo pleads with the Emir of Kuwait today, Dec. 9, 2007, to spare her life.

“The life of every overseas Filipino is important,” the President was quoted as saying by Press Secretary Ignacio R. Bunye who, for himself, stressed that “unless granted clemency, Ranario faces certain death for having killed her employer in what her lawyers claimed was an act of self-defense.”

President Arroyo is cutting short her scheduled nine-day European working trip by a day to intercede with the Kuwaiti Emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al Sabah, in behalf of the 34-year-old elementary school teacher from Surigao del Norte.

Malacanang is hopeful that the President’s meeting with the Emir — which was arranged by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) — could obtain a reprieve for the mother of two minor children who is scheduled to be hanged between now and February 2008.

This, after Kuwait’s Supreme Court, the Court of Cassation, affirmed Ranario’s death verdict last Nov. 27.

Arrested on Jan. 11, 2005 for the rage killing of her lady employer, Madame Najat Mahmoud Faraj Mobarak, Ranario was convicted for murder and sentenced to death by hanging by Kuwait’s Court of First Instance on Sept. 28, 2005.

One year and five months later on Feb. 17, 2007, Kuwait’s Court of Appeals sustained the death verdict on Ranario who was represented by five top-caliber Kuwaiti lawyers hired by the DFA to defend her.

In London last Thursday (Dec. 6), Secretary Bunye, who is accompanying the President in her European trip, had told reporters that the President’s planned meeting with the Emir is finally “a go.”

The DFA has so far obtained Letters of Forgiveness (tanazuls) from four of the six legal heirs of Ranario’s late employer. To complete the tanazuls requirement for a possible reprieve from the Emir who has three months to decide on the fate of Ranario, two more tanazuls are being obtained — one from the victim’s estranged husband, and the other from her maternal brother.

President Arroyo will be pleading with the Kuwaiti Emir for a possible commutation of Ranario’s death sentence, if not a grant of executive clemency for the embattled Filipina.